Rewriting History-a Reading Of Colin Johnson's Novels

Colin Johnson is a prolific and enigmatic Australian Aboriginal writer. Togetherwith Kath Walker, Jack Davis, and Kevin Gilbert, he is seen as one of the founders ofcontemporary Aboriginal literature. He has made significant contributions towards thedevelopment of Australian indigenous literature. His frequently-doubted Aboriginalidentity and his peculiar life experience have endowed him with a deep understandingof the sufferings of the Australian indigenous peoples and have left a profound impacton his outlook and literary creation. As a writer who writes from the fringe, ColinJohnson adopts different strategies at his disposal to rewrite the imperialist historydominated and formulated by a network of white discourse.For colonizers, Australia's history did not begin until Cook "discovered" the landand declared it as "terra nullius" in 1788. Australian indigenous past was completelydenied in European texts, in which the Aborigines were depicted as despicableenemies, subhuman. These texts played a decisive role in the process of colonizationlike their guns. The author of this thesis asserts that a more equitable account ofhistory post-1788 is possible if official history is mediated by a reading of Aboriginalliterature as history.Wild Cat Falling, the first Aboriginal novel in Australian literary history, is anautobiographical novel. The nature of autobiography requires it to combine thefunctions of both the historical and literary discourses, thus it can serve as a powerfultool for the construction of counter-histories. Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription forEnduring the Ending of the World, which came out in 1983, is considered to be hismasterpiece. It is the first Australian historical novel. The predominant concern of thisnovel is to challenge the myth of so-called colonial "settlement" that violentlyrevoked the sovereign rights of the original inhabitants and bequeathed ownershipand control of Australia to non-Aboriginal peoples. Critics have doubted the efficacyof rewriting history by resorting to novelistic discourses with fictitious plots andcharacters. The author of the present paper, however, believes that not only autobiographical novels but also historical novels can be truer histories.Starting from a different cultural point of view, Johnson subverts the other andself, civilized and barbarous and the so-called civilizing missions of the colonizers inhis Wild Cat Falling and Doctor Wooreddy. The present research will harnesspost-colonial theory as an analytical tool to elaborate on such strategies as language, naming and renaming deployed by Colin Johnson to decolonize the imperialisthistory under the domination of hegemonic discourse. The Aborigines in these twonovels are unlike the ones under white writers who depict them as being ignorant andbarbarous. They become the observers instead of the observed. They are depicted asfighters, thinkers, intellectuals. The Aborigines march from the fringe to the center.Conversely, the whites in the two novels are no longer the heroic explorers orcivilization propagators. They are cheats, ghosts, cannibals. Their hypocrisy, barbarity, and stupidity become the material of Aboriginal peoples' studies on humans.This thesis consists of five chapters. In the first chapter, some brief introductionto the author and the previous critics' study will be made. Chapter two is devoted tothe introduction of post-colonial theory as the analytical tool of this thesis. Suchconcepts as language, naming, representation and self-representation will beintroduced in this part. The following two chapters focus on textual analysis of thetwo novels respectively in an attempt to unveil how Johnson deploys corporealstrategies to rewrite history. In the last chapter, a conclusion that Johnson hassuccessfully rewritten history imposed on Australian Aborigines through his novelswill be reached.